Lamb lid pie

I am against "liddy pie" this is the thing usually served as a pie. A Lid or top normally made of puff pastry is floated on top of pie filling in and individual bowl. The one allowable savoury exception in my book is a hot pot pie. So I made one, having combined it with an idea I had whilst writing another post...

I mentioned lighter ales & lamb when I was talking about steak & ale pie and got to thinking about fruit beers. Being on a touch of an economy drive after Sat Bains I spotted lamb neck at the butchers & decided I'd give the idea a go. I added Liefman's Kriek to my basket.

First I melted & seasoned a bit of butter in my pan, tossed in garden herbs (mainly rosemary & bay) and half an onion and let it all sweat on a gentle heat.
I took most of the meat off the neck chops, cubed it & reserved one bone portion. The meat got dredged in flour  and then tossed into the pan to brown. That job done in went the beer and the bone, the whole lot was brought up to the boil. This is great fun as suddenly everything smells of cherries and your stew gains an excitable pink frothy head. Crank the heat back to a simmer, pop on the lid & go and enjoy yourself. Stews & pies are one of the best things about Autumn & Winter, they fill the house with a comforting cooking smell, the promise of filling food and allow you to loaf about reading whilst they simmer & burble away.

After an hour or two everything should be reduced down and cooked to tender. About 3/4 of the way through Chuck in a handful of chopped potato, you can do this at the start, but you need serious chunks unless you want the potato to just thicken the stew & not be a separate presence on the fork.
Turn the oven on to preheat, about gas 4 and break out the pastry. Roll it out to about 10-20mm larger than the top of your pot. Unfortunately the rim on my otherwise marvellous Le Creuset  pan is to thin to support the pastry so I had to transplant everything into a pyrex dish. Put the pastry over the stew and crimp to the rim of your dish, make a couple of knife slashes in the top to let the steam out and pop in the oven for 30 minutes or so.

I have to apologise for a couple of the recent photographs, they've been taken under less than ideal conditions, usually snatched with a phone cam in low light. Still they should give a reasonable idea of what I'm wittering about.

Lavender Lamb

I have a pretty small garden, with not even enough room for the number of roses I'd like to grow, so I appreciate multi-purpose plants, lavender fits this quite nicely. It can be used for more than toiletries though.

First get a leg (or part leg) of lamb, size depends on the number of people you want to feed (800g will feed 3 adults), then get it butterflied. You can do that yourself if you have the knives & the skill, but a decent butcher will do for you as part of buying the meat.

Next you'll need some lavender, you just want the flowers and since they are currently in bloom use fresh ones, you need a handful (if you have to use dried, they are more intense, so halve the amount), a couple of sprigs of rosemary and 4-5 garlic gloves. Grind it together with some pepper & salt and then add a dash of olive oil to bind it. Coat the lamb & leave it for a couple of hours.

You'll want a fairly hot BBQ/Grill. The lamb wants 10-15 minutes a side, I'm using a meat thermometer & its set at 65c which is the bottom end of well done. Normally I'd have lamb rarer than that, but I was cooking for a couple of other people that wanted/needed it well done. Once you time has elapsed or your chosen internal temperature is reached then take the lamb off & let it rest. It will produce a reasonable amount of juices, which can be used for sauce/stock/gravy. Most of the herb crust will have charred, so you can scrape that off, it's job is done now. Slice and serve

The lavender is quite a delicate flavour, which comes as a bit of a shock after the grinding (which can make your kitchen smell like a natural trust gift shop) and really complements the lamb well.

Roast Dinner

Remember that lamb shoulder ?

Here it is ready to go into the oven having been studded with garlic & herbs. For shoulder I use Jamie Oliver's slow roasted lamb recipe. I ignore the vegetables, preferring to go with a more standard roast potatoes and 2 veg serving style.

If you can get yourself a full shoulder this is one of the nicer things you can do with it. Season and herb stud the lamb and then slide it into the oven, it's going to be in there for 3-4 hours. you can leave it alone and just enjoy your kitchen warming up and being scented with roasting herbs & meat.

Its a very lazy way to make an impressive roast dinner, there are maybe 10 minutes of prep work required and then you've a couple of hours in which to do what ever you fancy before heading back to the kitchen to sort out veggies, mint sauce and any other bits of  dinner that you want.

The lamb comes out of the oven tender and juicy. Shoulder is horribly difficult to carve, so don't bother, shred it.

A full shoulder will comfortably feed 8 but don't plan on left overs (even though cold it makes a very good lunch) as somehow there never seems to be any.

The probe Doctor

As I mentioned a recent trip to Ikea saw the purchase of a Fantast meat thermometer which has been a boon in fudge making (more of which will probably happen tonight, using maple syrup as a kind of thanksgivingy treat)

On Sunday I used it for its designed purpose to test how cooked the lamb joint (from half a lamb ) was. Personally I'm a fan of rare, medium rare at a push, but there were other diners to satisfy, so I went to 65 c. It was perfectly done as medium, but like I say I'd have taken it out at 60-62 myself.

So if you are in the market for a cooking thermometer & can deal with going to Ikea (it doesn't appear to be available on line) then this is a cheap & reasonable solution.

Half a lamb

You may have noticed I'm a dedicated carnivore. At the farm shop today they had autumn lambs. £ 65 for half or £ 120 for an entire lamb.

What I hadn't realised and I have no idea why not was that the lamb would be butchered there & then. I'd assumed they'd have halves in the meat locker ready. If I'd known better I'd have consulted the textbooks to see what I could best use. As it was I had to go with what I know. (at this point I ought to say the half is being shared out, I was just charged with buying). Anyway I've got one of my favourite joints, a whole shoulder. That'll get roasted a party, it'll take several hours but it'll be rather fine. I quite fancy one of the leg joints & the belly, I'm happy to let most of the chops go though.

Anyway I must go and sort through the cuts & refridgerate/freeze as appropriate.


-- Posted from my iPhone